My late godfather was a solicitor and a barrister from Yorkshire. As with many Yorkshire folk, he spoke his mind plainly. He was a major influence on me during my formative years but is alas no longer with us. He was a very wise man and judicious in his pronouncements. One of his favourite pieces of advice was "Never trust a solicitor". Oh the irony! Of course, in my tender years I never quite understood why this man who I idolised would make such a pronouncement about the very profession which buttered his own bread. As the years have passed, I have developed a greater understanding of those words.
The first solicitor to become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom was a remarkable man in many ways. He was the last Prime minister for whom English was his second language (he was principally a Welsh speaker). He was the last Liberal Prime Minister. When he died in 1945, he had been the incumbent MP for Caernarfon Boroughs for an uninterrupted 55 years. As a back-bench MP before being appointed to Cabinet, he received no salary as was the custom in those days. He derived his income from his work as a solicitor to support his activities in the House of Commons. But although he was born just outside Manchester, he will forever be synonymous with the Welsh village to which his family relocated after the premature death of his father at the age of 44. The family moved first to Pembrokeshire to try their hand at farming but then relocated to the village of Llanystumdwy in Caernarfonshire. The rest is history but there can be no doubting the importance of David Lloyd George in terms of the British political landscape of the twentieth century.
Lloyd George was brought up in a devout evangelical atmosphere and began actively campaigning as a Liberal in 1885. It is worth mentioning that the Liberal party at that time was the main party of opposition to the Conservative party. The Labour party as we now know it was not even formed until 1900. By the end of his political career, the Liberal party had long since given way to the Labour party as the main party of opposition. But many of the policies of this great orator from Wales would be deemed far to the left even of Jeremy Corbyn. It could be argued that Lloyd George laid many of the foundations upon which the subsequent Labour party was built.
Loyd George's legacy is impressive to say the least. He instigated the foundations of what become the first welfare state, he was Prime Minister during the Great War having to contend with some very difficult decisions, he was influential in forming the shape of a new Europe after the Great War and he was largely responsible for the partitioning of Ireland in 1921. The chances of all these achievements coming from the son of a shoe-maker from Llanystumdwy were slim to say the least but there seems to be a strong tradition of over-achievement from that part of Wales. But every great political career carries a blemish which casts a lasting shadow and Loyd George was no different to the rest.
Lloyd George became embroiled in a public scandal in 1912 when it came to light that he and several other senior Liberals had invested in shares in Marconi knowing that the Government was about to award a huge contract to the Imperial Wireless Chain. Marconi was a subsidiary company of Imperial Wireless Chain. At that time, Lloyd George was the Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time of the scandal and three years earlier he had introduced the "People's Budget" which is still considered to be one of the most bruising in the way it penalised the rich in favour of the poor. So it may be come as no surprise that the hypocrisy of the Marconi Affair drew a great deal of interest from such literary giants as G.K Chesterton and the great George Bernard Shaw.
Of the Marconi scandal, The Times in 1913 wrote, "A man is not blamed for being splashed with mud. He is commiserated. But if he has stepped in to a puddle which he might easily have avoided, we say that it is his own fault. If he protests that he did not know it was a puddle, we say that he ought to know better; but if he says that it was after all quite a clean puddle, then we judge him deficient in the sense of cleanliness. And the British public like their public men to have a very nice sense of cleanliness".
A century later, our newspapers are full of the latest off-shore tax activities of the late father of our current Prime Minister. In the words of the Times from 1913, he appears to have had a very deficient sense of cleanliness. It also shows that the allegations of corruption in public life which dogged the political classes of 1913 are in good hands with the current denizens of Westminster. How sad that so little has changed in over a century.
But back to Caernarfonshire. 6 miles up the road from Llanystumdwy lies the village of Treemadog. This was the unlikely birthplace in 1888 of child born out of wedlock to Sir Thomas Chapman. He had left his wife to set up a new home with the governess of his family back home in Ireland. Their son was named Thomas Edward Lawrence but it better known to us as T.E Lawrence or "Lawrence of Arabia". After completing his studies in history at Oxford in 1910, he embarked first on a career as an archeologist but would go on to become a military officer and diplomat. His initial research as an archeologist had taken him to the Levant and Mesopotamia and he developed a sound knowledge of the geography and customs of both. In those days, those regions were under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. These days, the Levant is known as Jordan and Palestine and Mesopotamia is known as Syria and Iraq. Lawrence knew the manners, the customs and the language of the Arabs and was the key link between the Arabs and the British Army in their fight against the Ottoman Empire (modern day Turkey). The Sharif of Mecca himself counted Lawrence as one of his sons - it would be hard to imagine such adoption today! Mecca and Medina are of course the two holiest sites in the Islamic world and both lie in the Hejaz region on the Western edge of Arabia. During the latter stages of the Great War, Lawrence was instrumental in the capture of Damascus and helped to establish an Arab government. He had seen the importance of uniting the Arab world and nearly succeeded. In 1924, the Sharif as the self-proclaimed Caliph was denied British assistance to resist the advances of the House of Saud on Mecca. It was the last Caliphate and the Saudis have controlled the key Hejaz region ever since.
Of course, there are those who would argue with this assessment citing the emergence of ISIL. The regime which is causing so much concern with their violent activity in the Levant and Mesopotamia is affiliated to the Wahhabi doctrine of Sunni Islam which also controls modern day Saudi Arabia. The latter remains a proponent of torture, capital punishment, corporal punishment, sexual slavery, anti-semitism, anti-women's rights and the list just goes on and on. By any measure, the regimes of Saudi Arabia and ISIL are barbaric in the extreme.
The latest revelations surrounding the Panama Papers and tax evasion claim that the chief financier of President Assad's regime, Rami Makhlouf has benefited from this corruption with an estimated fortune of $5 billion at a time when millions of Syrians are being murdered, tortured and dispossessed. Of course, many have tried desperate measures to try and cross to Greece and a new life in Europe. Faced with the same regime at home, who amongst us would not have tried the same?
But the real scandal here is the corruption at the higher eschelons of public life both at home and abroad while the millions suffer. There comes a point beyond which immorality has been passed. Recent activities in both Syria and here in the UK have reminded us of the dangers of affording too much power to too few people. The altruistic aims of the "People's Budget" of 1909 and the aims of T.E.Lawrence to try and unite the Arab world seem a long way off. The Marconi legacy of Lloyd George in 1912 is sadly all too familiar.
The first solicitor to become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom was a remarkable man in many ways. He was the last Prime minister for whom English was his second language (he was principally a Welsh speaker). He was the last Liberal Prime Minister. When he died in 1945, he had been the incumbent MP for Caernarfon Boroughs for an uninterrupted 55 years. As a back-bench MP before being appointed to Cabinet, he received no salary as was the custom in those days. He derived his income from his work as a solicitor to support his activities in the House of Commons. But although he was born just outside Manchester, he will forever be synonymous with the Welsh village to which his family relocated after the premature death of his father at the age of 44. The family moved first to Pembrokeshire to try their hand at farming but then relocated to the village of Llanystumdwy in Caernarfonshire. The rest is history but there can be no doubting the importance of David Lloyd George in terms of the British political landscape of the twentieth century.
Lloyd George was brought up in a devout evangelical atmosphere and began actively campaigning as a Liberal in 1885. It is worth mentioning that the Liberal party at that time was the main party of opposition to the Conservative party. The Labour party as we now know it was not even formed until 1900. By the end of his political career, the Liberal party had long since given way to the Labour party as the main party of opposition. But many of the policies of this great orator from Wales would be deemed far to the left even of Jeremy Corbyn. It could be argued that Lloyd George laid many of the foundations upon which the subsequent Labour party was built.
Loyd George's legacy is impressive to say the least. He instigated the foundations of what become the first welfare state, he was Prime Minister during the Great War having to contend with some very difficult decisions, he was influential in forming the shape of a new Europe after the Great War and he was largely responsible for the partitioning of Ireland in 1921. The chances of all these achievements coming from the son of a shoe-maker from Llanystumdwy were slim to say the least but there seems to be a strong tradition of over-achievement from that part of Wales. But every great political career carries a blemish which casts a lasting shadow and Loyd George was no different to the rest.
Lloyd George became embroiled in a public scandal in 1912 when it came to light that he and several other senior Liberals had invested in shares in Marconi knowing that the Government was about to award a huge contract to the Imperial Wireless Chain. Marconi was a subsidiary company of Imperial Wireless Chain. At that time, Lloyd George was the Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time of the scandal and three years earlier he had introduced the "People's Budget" which is still considered to be one of the most bruising in the way it penalised the rich in favour of the poor. So it may be come as no surprise that the hypocrisy of the Marconi Affair drew a great deal of interest from such literary giants as G.K Chesterton and the great George Bernard Shaw.
Of the Marconi scandal, The Times in 1913 wrote, "A man is not blamed for being splashed with mud. He is commiserated. But if he has stepped in to a puddle which he might easily have avoided, we say that it is his own fault. If he protests that he did not know it was a puddle, we say that he ought to know better; but if he says that it was after all quite a clean puddle, then we judge him deficient in the sense of cleanliness. And the British public like their public men to have a very nice sense of cleanliness".
A century later, our newspapers are full of the latest off-shore tax activities of the late father of our current Prime Minister. In the words of the Times from 1913, he appears to have had a very deficient sense of cleanliness. It also shows that the allegations of corruption in public life which dogged the political classes of 1913 are in good hands with the current denizens of Westminster. How sad that so little has changed in over a century.
But back to Caernarfonshire. 6 miles up the road from Llanystumdwy lies the village of Treemadog. This was the unlikely birthplace in 1888 of child born out of wedlock to Sir Thomas Chapman. He had left his wife to set up a new home with the governess of his family back home in Ireland. Their son was named Thomas Edward Lawrence but it better known to us as T.E Lawrence or "Lawrence of Arabia". After completing his studies in history at Oxford in 1910, he embarked first on a career as an archeologist but would go on to become a military officer and diplomat. His initial research as an archeologist had taken him to the Levant and Mesopotamia and he developed a sound knowledge of the geography and customs of both. In those days, those regions were under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. These days, the Levant is known as Jordan and Palestine and Mesopotamia is known as Syria and Iraq. Lawrence knew the manners, the customs and the language of the Arabs and was the key link between the Arabs and the British Army in their fight against the Ottoman Empire (modern day Turkey). The Sharif of Mecca himself counted Lawrence as one of his sons - it would be hard to imagine such adoption today! Mecca and Medina are of course the two holiest sites in the Islamic world and both lie in the Hejaz region on the Western edge of Arabia. During the latter stages of the Great War, Lawrence was instrumental in the capture of Damascus and helped to establish an Arab government. He had seen the importance of uniting the Arab world and nearly succeeded. In 1924, the Sharif as the self-proclaimed Caliph was denied British assistance to resist the advances of the House of Saud on Mecca. It was the last Caliphate and the Saudis have controlled the key Hejaz region ever since.
Of course, there are those who would argue with this assessment citing the emergence of ISIL. The regime which is causing so much concern with their violent activity in the Levant and Mesopotamia is affiliated to the Wahhabi doctrine of Sunni Islam which also controls modern day Saudi Arabia. The latter remains a proponent of torture, capital punishment, corporal punishment, sexual slavery, anti-semitism, anti-women's rights and the list just goes on and on. By any measure, the regimes of Saudi Arabia and ISIL are barbaric in the extreme.
The latest revelations surrounding the Panama Papers and tax evasion claim that the chief financier of President Assad's regime, Rami Makhlouf has benefited from this corruption with an estimated fortune of $5 billion at a time when millions of Syrians are being murdered, tortured and dispossessed. Of course, many have tried desperate measures to try and cross to Greece and a new life in Europe. Faced with the same regime at home, who amongst us would not have tried the same?
But the real scandal here is the corruption at the higher eschelons of public life both at home and abroad while the millions suffer. There comes a point beyond which immorality has been passed. Recent activities in both Syria and here in the UK have reminded us of the dangers of affording too much power to too few people. The altruistic aims of the "People's Budget" of 1909 and the aims of T.E.Lawrence to try and unite the Arab world seem a long way off. The Marconi legacy of Lloyd George in 1912 is sadly all too familiar.
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